Mullions

Some days there are really no words for things I am thinking. You just got to avoid trying to go see through the mullion and instead push on through the transom to get anywhere outside of my vexed mind. But when you get those two together, well, you got yourself an understanding of a mighty strong window into the inner workings of my mind. Simple, eh?

I keep catching myself, at some level, on the various ideas and thoughts that some fine folks seem to think prudent to share with me. More, I find certain questions and restrictions we seem to place on life in general, at a minimum quizzical, if not down right absurd. I am not too much into labels excepts when they are expedient. But I begin to resist with a near apoplectic fit when they get attached to people. I appreciate we all do it from time to time in an effort to provide some reductionist rigidity to our modest improvisation on what we hope is a well-thought idea. “I am an American.” “I am male.” “I am an artist.” I get it. We all have a need driven by our ego to assert ourselves and provide meaning for those moments when we feel our edges slipping and oozing back into the infinitely undefinable expanse of reality. We pile up labels to shore up the encroaching infinities that threaten to drown us, we no more than dust smotes. Labels are shield and battle cry, we desperate to provide demarcation between our sense of worth in a universe of nameless indifference: we never label anything not worth labeling, only the “worthy” things in our lives get a name even if it just a mullion.

But then we go and label our needs and wants, attaching labels to people and ascribe to them their cut and line of their make. As I find myself stumbling, albeit resolutely, back into a world where I entertain the smallest of chances of finding a person to date that I come to face a veritable laundry list of requirements that both parties must satisfy. “I need a Christian.” “I need a confident person.” “I want to meet a go-getter and maker-of-their-destinies-kind-of-person.” We use labels to line and quarter our quarry, to dog and corral them into pens where we can then brand them and lay claim to them. But we lose the essence of a thing when we do this. We get nothing more than a label both hollow in form and empty of substance; no attribution or label is ever more than that: words.

When it comes to meeting people, when it comes to trying to understand a person, no words will ever really help us. No amount of pat psychology or simple rules of half-plus-7 rules can provide clarity for whether a person meets our needs and provides a meaningful compliment to our lives. I give you that it may be expedient and it may be practical, but there are there no mathematics or statistical probabilities with convenient variables for us to throw into some equation for us to crunch out an answer, a label saying “this is the person for me.” In the end, labels, like rules, block and sublimate reality into nothingness. Labels, at some fundamental level, are ultimately woefully disrespectful of an individual’s right to live in the dignity of their own light without the shadow of our labels covering them over.

There ain't nothing but me and this mullion and transom to frame my thoughts: it is window-perfect clear.